Education

By: Linda M. Perkins

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Education

The history of African American women's education is interwoven with the overall histories of both black education and women's education. The earliest histories of both of these groups were ones of exclusion, neglect, and discrimination. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the prevailing view of most of American society was that neither women nor African American men should be educated beyond what was appropriate to their prescribed—and inferior—roles in society.

Antebellum Era

While enslaved African Americans in the South were legally barred from learning to read prior to Emancipation, free African Americans in the North had nominal opportunities for schooling. This was one of the few freedoms they could enjoy, since in many northern states free African Americans were barred from voting, testifying in court, carrying arms, traveling freely, pursuing certain occupations, and obtaining an equal education. Free African Americans in the South faced even greater restrictions. They could be sold back into slavery if they did not have a certificate of freedom, and their right to assembly was restricted. Frequently, a “respectable” white person was required to attend any gathering of free African Americans.

White women of this era were expected to adhere to the image of idealized womanhood that has been referred to as the “cult of true womanhood” by the historian Barbara Welter. This idealized image stressed piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity for women. Literature of this period described women's natural fragility. Innocence and modesty were key attributes of the “true woman.” Central to the development of this new and perfect woman was the commitment to white women's education that emerged during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Female seminaries flourished throughout this period and offered curricula to correspond to society's expectation of women.

This notion of “true womanhood,” of course, did not include African American women. They could not be viewed as fragile or delicate since they frequently did the same work as male slaves. Further, the question of purity in relation to African American women was also moot since African American women were frequently victims of sexual assaults by overseers and masters and since they were required to mate with male slaves to increase the slave population.

The image of African American women as subhuman was made clear when Prudence Crandall, a white Quaker schoolteacher, opened a “genteel female seminary” for women of the prosperous village of Canterbury, Connecticut, in 1831, and in 1833 admitted an African American student. This action resulted in most of the white parents' withdrawing their daughters from the school. The public ridicule and condemnation that Crandall received prompted her to open a seminary solely for African American women.

Crandall advertised in the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator for a new “High school for young colored Ladies and Misses.” The references to African American women as “Ladies and Misses”—titles reserved for white women—were highly inflammatory to white citizens. Fifteen African American young women from Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Providence, and Connecticut responded to the ad and enrolled in the boarding school in April 1833. Outraged, the town authorities instituted a law that prohibited the teaching of any out-of-state black students. A series of events resulted in the demise of the school: town members refused to supply food to the school; the black students were threatened with prosecution as vagrants and paupers; the school's windows were broken; the water well was polluted; Crandall was arrested for harboring out-of-state African Americans; and finally the school was burned down.

There were other efforts by whites to educate African American women prior to the Civil War. Beatrice B. Butcher in “The Evolution of Negro Women's Schools in the United States” notes that from 1827 to 1863, sporadic attempts to offer classes to black girls and women were recorded in abolitionist and other New England newspapers. According to Butcher, most of the schools established by white women for black girls during this early period were to help “a downtrodden race of women” and centered on “handwork and rudiments of an English education.”

Most attempts to educate African Americans occurred when they took matters into their own hands. As early as 1793, a slave, Catherine Ferguson, purchased her freedom in New York, took forty-eight black and white children from an almshouse, and opened Katy Ferguson's School for the Poor. The same year, the Committee for Improving the Condition of Free Blacks in Pennsylvania opened a school and recommended an African American woman as teacher.

Unlike white society, where men and women lived in separate spheres, African Americans rarely experienced segregation by sex in their education. Because education had been denied both African American men and women, it was perceived as being important for the entire race—not just for men and boys. While single-sex schools evolved later and sexism did intensify within the black community as men and boys obtained rights unavailable to women and girls, throughout the nineteenth century blacks continued to view education as important for the entire race. It was not uncommon for African American families to relocate to areas where their daughters and sons could receive a better education. For example, when Blanche Harris was denied admission to a white female seminary in Michigan, her entire family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where she and her four brothers and her sister could receive a good education. Harris graduated from the Ladies' Department at Oberlin College in 1860 and her sister graduated ten years later. Similarly, the parents of Mary Jane Patterson, who was the first African American woman to earn a college degree (Oberlin, 1862), moved to Ohio from North Carolina in the 1850s so their children could receive an education. Four of the Patterson children—three of them women—graduated from Oberlin College.

Education within the African American community extended beyond the classroom and was augmented by the formation of literacy and educational societies. Philadelphia was the leader in the number of such organizations for both men and women. For example, in 1834, a group of African American women organized the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia. This group adhered to the prevailing ethos of African Americans during this period: that education was for the improvement of the race and not merely for individual accomplishments. As “daughters of a despised race,” the members of the Philadelphia organization aimed “to cultivate the talents entrusted to our keeping, that by so doing, we may…break down the strong barrier of prejudice, and raise ourselves to an equality with those of our fellow beings, who differ from us in complexion.” The women of this literary society submitted unsigned poems, essays, and short stories to be critiqued by one another. Their works were frequently published in the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator. During a period when women in all parts of society were universally ridiculed for educational aspirations, African American women actually received encouragement and praise from within the black community for their efforts to gain an education.

The founding in 1829 of the St. Frances Academy of Rome boarding school in Baltimore was another important event in the movement to educate black women. The Oblate Order, a group of French-educated black nuns, founded the school. Most of the women were from prosperous families. One of the nuns, Elizabeth Lange, became the first superior of the order and head of the school; she had operated a free school for poor black children in her home prior to the opening of St. Frances. Classes were offered in both French and Spanish. Because the St. Frances Academy was the only secondary institution available to African American females at that time, the school was well known. Girls from all over the country and Canada attended the academy. To preserve their native language, the sisters conducted classes at the academy on alternate days completely in French. By 1865 the school was coed and known simply as the St. Frances Academy.

Other institutions emerged during this period as well. The Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia was established in 1852 by the Society of Friends as the first coeducational classical high school, and the Normal School for Colored Girls was founded by a white woman, Myrtilla Miner, in the District of Columbia. These institutions produced some of the first formally trained African American teachers in the North prior to Emancipation.

Although most opportunities for the education of African Americans were in the North prior to the Civil War, many clandestine schools existed in the South during this period. For example, numerous such schools were reported in Savannah, Georgia. Julian Froumontaine, a black woman from Santo Domingo, openly conducted a free school for African Americans in that city as early as 1819, and she continued to teach secretly after the 1830s when such activity became illegal in the South. Another black woman, known only as Miss DeaVeaux, opened an underground school in 1838 and operated it for more than twenty-five years without the knowledge of local whites. There were similar schools in other areas of the South as well. In Natchez, Mississippi, the slave Milla Granson learned to read and write from her master's children, and then she taught hundreds of slaves to read and write in what they termed “Milla's midnight school” because the classes were held after midnight. These educational activities not only reveal the importance that African Americans of this era placed on education but also demonstrate the risk that they took to obtain it.

Several black women became educators after the Civil War. Fanny Jackson Coppin was one of many. She was born a slave in 1837 in the District of Columbia; her freedom was purchased by the time she was twelve by a devoted aunt. She was sent to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and later to Newport, Rhode Island, to live with relatives, where it was believed her educational opportunities would be greater. Surrounded by the numerous black self-help and literary groups, as a young girl Coppin decided to “get an education and help my people.” While working as a domestic in Newport, she was allowed by her employers to hire a tutor for one hour, three days a week. She later attended the segregated schools of Newport and by 1859 had completed the normal course at the Rhode Island State Normal School. She continued her education by enrolling in Oberlin College in Ohio in 1860, the only institution in the nation that admitted both black Americans and white women into the same program with white men. Coppin obtained financial assistance from Bishop Daniel Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Coppin excelled at Oberlin and graduated with a baccalaureate degree in 1865, becoming one of the earliest black women to obtain a college degree. She spent her entire professional career as principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia.

Bound together by a common sorrow, black women and men, whether free or slave, were intricately linked. Viewed by society as neither humans nor citizens, they had to work together to “uplift” the race. This effort required the contributions of both men and women. Consequently, as the black community sought to obtain whatever education was available to them during this period, the education of women was included.

Emancipation and Reconstruction

With the end of legal slavery, African Americans immediately sought to obtain the education denied them in bondage. Numerous studies have recounted the efforts former slaves made to become literate. The black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois reported in his 1901 study, Negro Common School, that two years after the Civil War, fewer than 100,000 African American children were in schools in the South. However, the demand for literacy was so great that by 1900, more than 1.5 million black students were enrolled.

It is well known that several thousand northern white female teachers journeyed to the South during and after the Civil War to teach in private schools established by an array of missionary and religious organizations, and by the federal government's Freedman's Bureau. It is less well known that black women played a crucial role in the massive task of educating the newly emancipated slaves. When the American Missionary Association (AMA), the largest of the organizations to establish schools in the South for African Americans, arrived to open a school in Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in 1861, it found the prosperous black woman Mary S. Peake already teaching. Her school became the first AMA school in the South.

These private elementary and secondary institutions (along with black colleges established in the South in the decades following the Civil War) educated the bulk of the earliest African American teachers. Over 70 percent of the teacher training took place in these private black institutions. The white South was so hostile to the education of African Americans that (as Du Bois reported) between 1900 and 1910, the number of black students attending publicly financed common schools had in some places decreased.

Most black colleges in the South were overwhelmingly devoted to preparatory and secondary education in the nineteenth century. Consequently, most black women and men obtained their collegiate training during this period from predominately white institutions. Du Bois reported in his 1900 study of black college graduates that a total of 252 women—compared with 2,272 men—had obtained baccalaureate degrees. Of this number, 65 had graduated from Oberlin College. Only 22 of the 156 graduates of black colleges by 1900 were women.

This great disparity in educational achievement concerned some African Americans. The Oberlin graduate and educator Anna Julia Cooper, in her book A Voice from the South (1892), addressed the trend and the issue of growing sexism within the black community, which she believed would ultimately limit educational opportunities for African American women. She wrote, “I fear the majority of colored men do not yet think it worthwhile that women aspire to higher education …. Let money be raised and scholarships be founded in our colleges and universities for self-supporting worthy young women.”

During the 1890s, African American women became increasingly concerned about issues specific to women and children of the race and organized the National Association of Colored Women in 1895. Education, job opportunities, protection from sexual assaults by white men in the South, and defense of the character of African American women were the primary focus of this group. With black women concerned about the special plight of African American girls and the growing population of single black women nationwide, numerous attempts were made to establish schools exclusively for black women by black women.

Among the first African American women to establish such a school was Lucy Laney. Born free in Georgia in 1854, Laney attended American Missionary Association schools, and in 1873 she graduated from the first normal class of Atlanta University. With the assistance of the Presbyterian Board of Missions, in 1886 Laney founded the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia. Intended to be a girls' school, Haines became coed because of the need for a high school for both boys and girls, though most of the students were girls.

Likewise, Mary McLeod Bethune, who became a renowned educator and leader within the African American community, was inspired by Laney to establish a school for black girls. Bethune taught at Haines for one year and later moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, where she opened the Daytona Normal and Industrial Schools for Negro Girls in 1904. Although Bethune intended it to be for females only, her own son attended from the first day the school was opened. As with Laney's Haines Institute, the need for education was so great that single-sex institutions were a luxury the black community could not afford. Within two years, boys enrolled in the school. In 1923 a formal merger took place with the Cookman Institute for Boys, creating Bethune-Cookman College. It was not until 1943, however, that this institution awarded baccalaureate degrees.

Nannie Helen Burroughs, a graduate of M Street High School in Washington, DC, founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in 1909 in the nation's capital. She was a prominent churchwoman in the National Baptist Church, and her school was initially funded by the National Baptist Women's Convention, an auxiliary to the men's convention. Burroughs was also a devotee of Booker T. Washington, and her school's emphasis was on “Christian womanhood” and vocational training. Sewing, home economics, practical and home nursing, bookkeeping, shorthand, typing, gardening, laundering, interior design, printing, shoe repairing, and barbering were taught. The school closed with Burroughs's death in 1961.

Many other institutions were formed after the Civil War for African American women, primarily by religious denominations and/or privately by white individuals. These included Hartshorne Memorial College (1864) in Richmond, Virginia; Mary Allen Seminary (1885) in Crockett, Texas; Montgomery Industrial School (1886) in Montgomery, Alabama; Mary Holmes Seminary (1892) in Jackson, Mississippi, later moved to West Point, Mississippi; and Barber Memorial Seminary (1896) in Anniston, Alabama. Hartshorne merged with all-male Virginia Union College in Richmond, and Mary Allen became a coeducational junior college by the 1930s. Most of the other small seminaries and schools that were of secondary school level and founded for black women during this period disappeared as public education became more available after World War II.

Two institutions founded in the nineteenth century that were all-female and reached college status in the twentieth century were Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Two white New England women established Spelman College in 1881, and the Methodist Episcopal Church opened Bennett College in 1873 as a coeducational institution. It became a women's college in 1926.

Secondary and Higher Education in the North (1865–1900)

This period witnessed enormous growth in higher educational opportunities for white women. In addition to the many seminaries for women that had been founded after the Civil War, coeducational state universities and some private colleges, including Boston University, Cornell, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago opened their doors to women. According to the historian Rosalind Rosenberg, by 1872 ninety-seven colleges admitted women. Also, a group of seven elite colleges termed the “Seven Sisters” (Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard, so named because they were “sister” colleges to the elite male Ivy League universities) evolved. Although these colleges emerged as a response to white women's exclusion from the all-male colleges, most of them practiced their own form of exclusion by barring black women's entrance. Many other educational institutions established for white women also banned black women. In a 1900 study of black college students, W. E. B. Du Bois noted that it was easier for a black male to gain entrance into a white male college than for a black woman to gain entrance into a white female college. Du Bois also wrote that white women's institutions were “unyielding” in their opposition to admitting African American women.

In spite of the formal opposition to their presence, black women did attend and graduate from some of the Seven Sister colleges. Hortense Parker of Ripley, Ohio, graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1883, which was during its seminary years. The first black woman to earn a college degree from Mount Holyoke was Martha Ralston of Worcester, Massachusetts, the daughter of an Englishman and an African American mother. Harriett Alleyne Rice of Newport, Rhode Island, graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1887. Rice earned a medical degree from the Women's Medical School of the New York Infirmary in 1893. Radcliffe College graduated Alberta Scott, a local student from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894. In 1897 a woman of African American ancestry who was light enough to pass for white created a scandal at Vassar College when it was discovered prior to her graduation that she was African American. The event drew significant press coverage (“Negro Girl at Vassar” read one headline), and the Vassar faculty debated whether to deny Hemmings her diploma and degree. In the end, Hemmings did graduate. In 1900, Smith College graduated Otellia Cromwell of Washington, DC. Cromwell was the daughter of John Wesley Cromwell, a prominent educator and chief examiner in the U.S. Post Office. Her brother, John Jr., was a graduate of Dartmouth College, and her sister Mary had graduated from the University of Michigan. Otellia Cromwell's niece, Adelaide Cromwell, graduated from Smith College in 1940 and was the first African American appointed to the school's faculty. Barnard College in New York and Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania were the last of the seven colleges to admit African American women. It was not until 1928 that Zora Neale Hurston became Barnard College's first black graduate, a circumstance that was created when she transferred to Barnard in 1925. Enid Cook of Washington, DC, graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1931 with a double major in chemistry and biology. She earned a PhD in bacteriology from the University of Chicago in 1937.

Twentieth Century

In the twentieth century, African American women built on the foundations they had laid in previous decades by continuing their educations. This happened on two levels: first, black women attended graduate and professional school in increasing numbers, and then they applied those studies by becoming collegiate faculty members themselves.

Black Women, Graduate School, and Professional School

. Because the earliest institutions of higher education were established for men, a black male, Edward Bouchet, obtained a doctorate in 1876 from Yale University in physics whereas the first white female, Helen Magill, did not receive a doctorate until one year later, from Boston University. It was not until 1921 that the first African American women earned PhD degrees. Black women who were educated in northern institutions of higher education or at black collegiate institutions were able to pursue advanced study during the early decades of the twentieth century. By the time that black women were awarded doctorates, white women had made great strides in graduate education. For example, in 1920 alone, ninety-three white women earned doctorates. By that same year, only twenty African American men had earned doctorates since 1876.

Delois Huntley.  On 4 September 1957, Delois de-segregated Alexander Graham Junior High in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Photograph from Public Library of Charlotte-Meckenburg County, by permission of the Charlotte Observer

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At that time, African American institutions of higher learning were generally still impoverished and unaccredited. Thus, the earliest black women to undertake graduate studies were graduates of white institutions and also the products of educated and privileged families. In 1921 Eva Dykes, Sadie Tanner Alexander, and Georgiana Simpson earned doctorate degrees. Although Dykes graduated from Howard University, she had to obtain a second baccalaureate degree from Radcliffe because the Howard degree did not fulfill the requirements for graduate study. (W. E. B. Du Bois likewise had to obtain a second baccalaureate degree from Fisk University when he went to pursue graduate studies at Harvard.) Tanner had an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, while Simpson's was from the University of Chicago.

In addition to race, undergraduate preparation and social class explain the disparity between the number of white women with doctorates and the number of African Americans. Up until the years following World War I, most black colleges in the South were unaccredited and focused upon primary and secondary work. Hence, students from these institutions did not have the prerequisite requirements for entrance into graduate institutions. In addition, many white institutions did not admit African American students into their graduate programs.

The 1920s witnessed the growth of public schools for African Americans in the South, which resulted in the transformation of many black colleges to full collegiate status. These colleges began to seek full accreditation, and at that time, African American men began to obtain appointments as presidents of these institutions. In turn, those men began to name more African Americans to teaching positions. Beginning in the 1930s, African American men and women started to legally challenge the racially segregated graduate and professional schools in the Midwest and South. The Julius Rosenwald Foundation, the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, and organizations such as the National Urban League began providing scholarships and fellowships to African Americans to increase the number of black professionals between 1928 and 1948. Black women by the hundreds applied for these awards. However, because so many black women attended teacher training and land grant institutions, few qualified to receive them. A report of the General Education Board in 1938 noted that “only a handful of the strongest [black] institutions are capable of presenting us with eligible applicants.” Board members noted in the report that graduates of Atlanta University, Morehouse, Spelman, and Fisk (as well as one or two other schools) seemed to have the most ability.

A 1946 survey of African Americans with doctorates and professional degrees noted that only 45 of the 381 recipients of doctorates and professional degrees were women. Of the top twenty baccalaureate degree institutions producing these doctoral recipients, none were the teacher-training institutions or black land grant colleges that were favored by African American women. The top five black baccalaureate degree institutions were Howard, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Fisk, Virginia Union, and Morehouse. Three of those institutions were all-male. Overwhelmingly, African American women who received doctorates by 1946 were graduates of white undergraduate institutions. Undeterred, black women attending the unaccredited institutions sought to improve their credentials and earn advanced degrees. The records of the Rockefeller Foundation and Julius Rosenwald Foundation for graduate fellowships between the 1920s and 1940s reveal that more than half of the black women applicants had attended summer sessions at their own expense prior to obtaining foundation funds. They attended the leading institutions in the nation: Harvard, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Cornell, Michigan, Ohio State, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and the University of Chicago. So many African Americans attended the Teachers College of Columbia University during the summer in the 1930s and 1940s that it was not uncommon for a third of the student body to be African American. According to a 1938 report of the General Education Board, Columbia University had graduated 121 black students, compared with 81 from the University of Chicago and 66 from Howard University.

The applications of African American women who attended the Seven Sister colleges or other white institutions were viewed favorably by the Rosenwald Foundation and the General Education Board. Spelman College, which was endowed by the Rockefeller family and named in honor of Laura Spelman Rockefeller, also had a special relationship with the General Education Board. Its graduates, students, and faculty received significant aid from this foundation. When Florence Read, the president of Spelman from 1927 to 1944, recommended a student or faculty member to the General Education Board, that person was virtually assured a fellowship. As a result, Spelman College women had a long history of graduate and professional education. In the five-year period between 1947 and 1952, 111 Spelman alumnae attended graduate and professional school.

While the number of African American women graduate students was small compared with white women and African American men by the end of World War II (only 45 women out of 381 black recipients of doctorates), those who did go on to graduate school broke new ground and provided the visibility and female role models absent from their own youth. Many African American women worked and paid their own way to graduate schools by attending numerous summer sessions over a period of years and sometimes decades. Other African American women young enough to benefit from the funds available through the Rosenwald and Rockefeller foundations, as well as scholarships from the various institutions that the women attended, were able to obtain an education that once had been unobtainable and unimaginable, particularly to those in many of the black colleges.

Black Colleges and Black Women Faculty

. As the departments at black colleges increased both in number and in size, so did the number of women enrolled in those departments. Twenty-three percent of the students at Howard, Atlanta University, Fisk, and Shaw during the 1898–1899 school year were women. However, by 1910, black women graduates slightly outnumbered black male college graduates annually. This trend continued throughout the century and, except for the decade of the 1920s, African American women annually earned more college degrees than black men.

The reasons for the great disparity in the numbers of African American women and men with college degrees are complicated. Although women outnumbered men nationally in high school attendance in general in the twentieth century, black women did so at numbers greater than the national average. For example, public high school enrollment figures by race and gender for fifteen southern cities in 1915 show that while white women represented 56 percent of all white high school students, African American women represented 66 percent of black students attending high schools within the same cities.

The disenfranchisement of black men after Reconstruction and the fact that black men could not obtain employment commensurate with their educational experiences resulted in black families' educating daughters disproportionately to sons in the twentieth century. Teachers were critically needed in the developing school systems in the South and employment was virtually guaranteed to any minimally trained person. While the salaries in the black public schools of the South were abysmal, the work was highly respectable and desperately needed. In the twentieth century, teaching was increasingly viewed as primarily women's work, and as a result, black women were overrepresented in the student bodies of the state land grant teacher-training colleges.

Although a higher percentage of black men than white men taught, as other employment opportunities opened to black males, fewer remained in the teaching profession. For example, the 1930 census reported that 45,672 black women were school teachers, compared with 8,767 African American men. A 1938 study of black college graduates indicated that 71 percent of black elementary school teachers and 63 percent of black high school teachers were women. Despite these figures, few black women were represented in leadership positions within these schools. Only one in fifteen high school principals and one in every five elementary school principals were female.

These numbers were disturbing to Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first black female dean at Howard University (1922–1937). In a survey Slowe conducted in 1931 of 153 first-year women at Howard University concerning their careers, 90 percent indicated that they aspired to teach. Unlike the state teachers colleges that most black college women attended, Howard University was the preeminent liberal arts institution that provided more curriculum offerings and career choices. However, Slowe was disturbed to discover that even at Howard, black women students were overwhelming pursuing teaching careers. In response, Slowe wrote an article in 1933 entitled, “Higher Education of Negro Women.” Repeating concerns first voiced by Anna Julia Cooper three decades earlier, Slowe pointed out the varied career opportunities available to black men juxtaposed with the fact that black women seemed limited to careers in education and social work. Surveying four coeducational black colleges, Slowe discovered that black women received little in courses, activities, or role models that prepared them for leadership. Although leadership was expected of educated African Americans, Slowe charged that black colleges perpetuated a conservative view of women that limited their leadership growth. It seemed that black women were expected to serve but not lead.

Unlike academic white women—who were shut out of faculty positions at most coeducational institutions except in traditional female disciplines and were virtually unemployable at all-male institutions—black women were represented on the faculties and staffs of most campuses that employed African Americans, even the all-male Morehouse College. The need was so great for educated black faculty members that barring women from such positions because of gender bias would have been difficult. Though whites dominated the college presidencies of most of the elite historically black colleges well into the twentieth century, black land grant institutions had African American presidents from their beginnings. In addition, most students in these institutions were women.

The appointment of African Americans—men or women—to the faculties of black colleges was directly related to whether or not these institutions were headed by African Americans. In general, black colleges that were funded by white philanthropists were slow in hiring African American faculty members, while those funded by black religious denominations and the black land grant colleges always had African American presidents who were committed to building their faculties with black men and women. For example, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania was founded in 1854 as an all-male institution by Presbyterians (it became coeducational in 1952). Lincoln had white presidents and an all-white faculty until the 1920s. In contrast, Wilberforce College in Ohio, founded in 1863 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and headed by black clergy, employed both African American men and women on its faculty. Mary Church Terrell's first job after graduating from Oberlin in 1884 was as a faculty member at Wilberforce. In her autobiography, Terrell noted that she had received offers from other black colleges but decided on Wilberforce because her father did not approve of her living in the South.

When Eva Dykes, Georgiana Simpson, and Sadie Tanner Mossell (later Alexander) earned their doctorates in 1921, they were all recruited to the faculties of black colleges. When Mordecai Johnson became the first African American president of Howard University in Washington, DC, in 1926, he recruited all three women to Howard's faculty. Dykes and Simpson, both single, accepted the offer. Mossell had married the attorney Raymond Pace Alexander in 1923 and was living in Philadelphia. She decided against a commuting marriage and declined the offer. Many other talented African American women spent their lives as college professors. In addition, unlike most white institutions, black colleges employed married couples.

In an essay on black academic couples, many of the black women interviewed noted that black faculty couples were the norm on black college campuses. Professor Mildred Barksdale met her future husband Richard Barksdale when they were both on the faculty at North Carolina Central University in the mid-1950s. They later married in 1960 when Richard Barksdale left to head the English department at Morehouse College, and Mildred noted the ease with which she obtained employment at Atlanta University. She said she was hired the first day she arrived in Atlanta and noted that it was fiscally advantageous to black campuses to hire couples. In addition, she pointed out that the colleges needed the expertise of the women, who were frequently as well educated as the men, on these campuses. Mildred Barksdale recalled that when she was an undergraduate student at Jackson College (later Jackson State University) in Mississippi during the 1940s, at least a third to half of the faculty and staff were couples.

Another black women faculty member, Winona Lee Fletcher, who taught at Kentucky State University for twenty-seven years with her husband, Joseph Fletcher, also noted that black colleges could not have survived without the talents of black women faculty members. It was economically beneficial to black colleges to hire black couples, and such situations often entailed a two-for-one arrangement. Schools had to choose between hiring both or hiring neither.

With regard to salaries, the women always made less. Fletcher stated that despite the enormous teaching loads and the low pay, the sense of family that existed on most campuses and the commitment and dedication to the students made the experience exciting and rewarding.

Even the wives of the presidents at black colleges worked. Margaret Murray Washington, the third wife of Booker T. Washington, served as lady principal at Tuskegee Institute prior to their marriage and continued in that position after their marriage in 1892. Benjamin E. Mays's wife, Sadie, was a Rosenwald Fellow in the 1930s and earned graduate degrees in social work from the University of Chicago. She taught at the Howard University School of Social Work while her husband was dean of Howard's Divinity School in the 1930s. After he became president of Morehouse College in 1940, she taught at the Atlanta School of Social Work. Beulah Gloster, the wife of Hugh Gloster, Mays's successor at Morehouse College, held a doctorate in English and taught in the college's Department of English without pay. Susie Jones, the wife of David Jones, president of Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, from 1926 to 1956, served throughout his presidency as registrar of the college, also without salary.

Anti-nepotism rules did exist in some black colleges. Although most administrators at these institutions sought to circumvent the rules, some women indicated in their reports to the Rosenwald and Rockefeller foundations that they were not working, owing to anti-nepotism rules. For example, Edmonia Louise Walden, a General Education Board Fellow in 1930, reported to the foundation in 1936 that she had been dropped from the faculty of West Virginia State (where she taught home economics) because she married a man who worked on the same faculty. She explained how a rule had been passed that stated that two people from the same family could not be paid by the state. Similarly, Hilda Lawson Reedy, the first African American woman to earn a doctorate at the University of Illinois and a Rosenwald Fellow from 1937 to 1940, reported losing her position at Lincoln University in Missouri owing to her 1941 marriage to another faculty member, Sidney Reedy. She noted that the Lincoln board opposed the employment of wives of faculty members. She was rehired as an “emergency appointment” by the school authorities. Ruth Brett earned a doctorate from Teachers College in 1945 and served as an administrator and faculty member on numerous black college campuses before marrying Benjamin Quarles, a professor of history at Morgan State College in Baltimore, in 1952. Brett stated that when she was hired, she was advised by the president of Morgan not to use the name Quarles so that she could sidestep the state's anti-nepotism rules. She noted that other married women on campus did likewise.

Sister Presidents

. Three African American women had served as college presidents prior to the 1980s: Mary McLeod Bethune served as president of Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute (later Bethune-Cookman College) from 1904 to 1942; Mary A. Branch served as president of the A.M.E-founded Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, from 1930 to 1944; and Willa Player served as president of Bennett College from 1955 to 1966. With the growth of integration and both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement, more doors opened for some highly talented black women educators. Jewel Plummer Cobb, a cell physiologist, was appointed dean of Connecticut College in 1969 and later dean of Douglass College of Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1976. In 1981, she was appointed president of the California State University at Fullerton. Yolanda T. Moses, an anthropologist, also moved through the ranks of the California state university system during the 1980s before she was appointed president of the City College of the State University of New York. She held that position from 1993 to 1999, when she moved on to head the American Association of Higher Education. Ruth J. Simmons, a scholar of Romance languages and comparative literature, created national news when she was appointed president of Smith College in 1995 and president of Brown University in 2002. She was the first black to serve as president of Smith and the first black or woman to serve as president of the Ivy League's Brown University. Simmons had served as a professor and administrator at Princeton University. Shirley Ann Jackson, a physicist who was the first black woman to earn a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1973), was named president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

A Demonstration in Florida.  As African American women in higher education struggle for tenure and promotion, teachers in primary and secondary education also face challenges.

Florida State Archives

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Cobbs and Simmons were products of black undergraduate institutions, while Moses and Jackson were graduates of white undergraduate institutions. Crisis magazine reported in 2001 that there were twenty-seven black women presidents of white, four-year institutions.

Positions of leadership at black colleges also became available to African American women. In 1987, the historically all-male (but now coeducational) Lincoln University in Pennsylvania hired an African American woman, Niara Sudarkasa. Also in that same year, Spelman College appointed Johnetta Cole as its first African American woman president. These historic appointments were followed throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century with appointments of numerous other African American women as presidents of historically black colleges.

Twenty-First Century: Progress and Challenges

African American women have made enormous progress in American higher education. Not only have the numbers of black women enrolled as college students continued to grow, but their completion rates have also increased. While the number of women in American education relative to men has increased in general, the numbers for African American women have been particularly imbalanced. Sixty-five percent of all African American college students are female. In addition, the completion rate of black women versus black men is 43.5 percent versus 34.4 percent. While African American men command more earning power than black women in comparable positions, it is clear that the continued gender imbalance relative to education within the African American community can have a potential long-term impact on society. These data may provide many with the perception that higher education and academic pursuits are primarily a female endeavor within the black community. And bright young black males, particularly those without financial means, may feel less inclined to view college as a viable option.

As of 2004, it was worth pausing to applaud the significant progress made by African American women in American higher education, as evidenced by the many impressive positions held by them at that time. However, there were still many academic African American women nationally who were struggling through the tenure and promotion process. Isolation and tokenism were still a reality for many African American academics of both genders. Yet, despite those challenges, one needed only to look at the presidential appointments of Ruth Simmons and Shirley Jackson to acknowledge that indeed the world had changed and was definitely still changing.

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